“Janka, do not make a pastime of that Imszanski any more: he is not worth playing with.”
“Well said, but? …”
“Hear me out, Janka. Till the present moment, I was not aware that I loved you and you alone. … May I hope, or is it quite out of the question?”
“Good God, Stephen! pray don’t think of proposing! I got a proposal only the other day. There must be something in the air—infection—the approach of spring! At any rate, I am not in a consenting mood now; so let me be.”
I laughed, but was in reality very much upset.
When last together, Gina asked me to come over to her apartments, as she wanted me to read something she had.
It was almost gayly that she welcomed me in. Her eyes had lost their customary look of apathy, and shone with a strange fire.
“Owinski is going to be married this very week,” she remarked, as if stating a fact which did not concern her. “Have you read his poems?”
“I have; Witold and I read them together.”
“One of his poems had been dedicated to me; I know, for I myself saw it in proof—a proof that I myself corrected. And now the dedication has been removed from the title. When he received the revised proof, he probably crossed it off.”
She then took two closely written sheets of letter-paper out of a drawer.
“A letter from her!” she explained.
“To you!”
“Yes. Just read it.”
It ran thus:
“I have long been wishing to write to you, Madame; and if I have not made up my mind till now, this was neither from any want of courage on my part, nor any misplaced sense of delicacy, which would in this case be not only exaggerated, but groundless. It simply proceeded from the fact that, as I think the greatest alleviation of sorrow to consist in the possibility of hating someone on account of it, I did not like to deprive you of the object of your hate. For I am of opinion that, as soon as you have read this, you will not think me your enemy any more.
“If I write now, it is because I believe that, in lieu of such consolation, I am able to afford you another; and I do so without the knowledge of my fiancé, for I have my doubts whether it would be pleasant to him or the reverse; and besides, I do not consider him as the sole means by which we might come to understand each other.
“The evening on which we were both under the same roof has remained with me as a painful memory. Not because I then felt at all to blame on your account. As I had been aware from the beginning that O. was affianced, I played no active part in the matter to attract him. Any other woman might have been in my place, and done just the same, so far as you were concerned. O. was at that time in want of a figure upon his life chessboard, such as is called a formally affianced wife; so we met and encountered each other by mere chance—a happening without logical relevance to anything. Nor was it because I felt for you what is called pity. My mind would never consent to abase you by venturing to entertain such a feeling; and I think, too, that I am an object of pity not less than yourself. No; the meeting was painful to me only for the following reason; I myself, looking on things as an outsider, cannot help having a fellow-feeling for all who have been worsted; so that I experienced self-dislike. It was painful, because I was present to your mind as a stranger, a successful rival, nothing but the fiancée of your fiancé, a hostile, unknown She: not a woman, drawn close to you by your and my sense of our hard fate. It was painful to me to sit so far apart from you, to be unable to approach you and look into your thoughtful eyes with eyes that were not less thoughtful, and kindly too, and talk to you about many a subject far more important than the law which thrusts us apart: the law, known from time immemorial, that love is not everlasting, and that it needs variety.
“To write of my friendly feeling towards you would certainly seem somewhat paradoxical. I will therefore say no more than this; I deeply and sincerely esteem you, as one after my own heart, as a New Woman, a woman conscious of her own value and of her rights; I appreciate you also for your subtlety of emotion, and your original artistic talent. And then, besides, I have a certain debt of gratitude which is due to you personally, and owing to the fact that O. has for several years been pretty faithful to you; and thus the list of his transitory amours which distress me so is considerably shorter than it would otherwise have been. I bear you no grudge, no, not even when O. (for my delectation!) goes back into the past, and tells me all about his former love for you.
“I trust you feel no longer any instinctive dislike or aversion for me; do you? And now I will, in return for what you have to suffer, give you the information that you have indeed but very little reason to envy my lot. Like you, I am one of those unhappy beings who must needs suffer, whatever their circumstances may be, because life is too brutally inexorable, and we—we whose nerves are laid bare—cannot walk through life without suffering. Then, examining the question quite objectively, may we not unhesitatingly assert that it is preferable to endure suffering for a positive loss, whilst we enjoy the memory of past happiness (or at least the illusion that such happiness would have been possible, had circumstances and environment been different), rather than to endure it at that one period of our
